Why Some Professors Suck
Teaching is like every other profession. Some people don’t belong. Surprised? Despite the long hours and stagnant pay, a handful of sad clowns still go into education because nobody else will take them. They give the rest of us a bad rap. Most professors deserve tenure, and we work our asses off for it. But every now and then, someone slips through quality control. Don’t ask me how or why. All I know is that it happens. Sure, I could tell you about all the great and wonderful professors I work with, but you want to hear about the shitty ones. You dirty scoundrels. I forgive you.
First, there’s Dr. Love. The professor who sees teaching as a free dating service. And why not? No other job introduces you to roughly 50–100 single women every three months, most of them between the age of 18–30. My first year as a professor, one guy even admitted as much to me. “Sometimes I wonder if I became professor only to meet every hot blond chick in the state.” Dr. Love had a masterful routine. He actually looked up his hottest students’ phone numbers and called them on weekends, when he was bored. He invited the smart ones to his house for coffee and biscotti. They didn’t know what biscotti was and were willing to try it.
Poor girls, they must’ve been so disappointed to find out biscotti is French for stale cookie. Eventually, one of the victims filed a complaint against Dr. Love. Over sexual harassment, of course. Not the biscotti.
Next, we have Dr. YouTube: This one Shakespeare professor showed videos in his classes all the time. They weren’t even about Shakespeare. I mean, come on. If any college professor could ever get away with showing movies all year, it would be a Shakespearean. “Here, watch this adaptation of Coriolanus, and let’s talk about it. The correct pronunciation is Rafe Fines, not Ralph Fineness. You leave out the l.” You’d still be doing your job, which is talking about movies. But not this guy. Every week, he devoted about 20 minutes of class to funny clips about bad drivers, people tripping over stairs, music dubs, and sometimes entire documentaries about turkey farms.
Sometimes he tried to relate the videos to class, but everybody knew he was just using filler. Your comparison of Taylor Swift to Cordelia only holds up under so much scrutiny, pal.
Next, there’s Dr. PowerPoint. He basically turned every chapter of a textbook into a slide show presentation, and then added narration to each slide, for about 40 slides per class. The worst part? He inserted different animations to each slide, to the point where you felt like you were hallucinating. Did a flock of birds really just drop the letters onto that screen? Are the letters supposed to be droppings? Are pigeons actually shitting words onto this slide? Where am I, some fucked up Wonderland? Have I been roofied by my PSYCH 101 Professor?
The asshole didn’t even deliver his lectures live. He pre-recorded them, started up the presentation for us, and then walked back to his office. By mid semester, most of us had stopped coming. I wonder if the professor arrived at some point, saw an empty lecture hall, and started the PowerPoint anyway. Just in case, you know?
Up next, Dr. Ego. You might think Dr. Ego was a man, but the worst ego I ever encountered was a woman. She was a creative writing teacher in my graduate program, and she had the special talent of turning every class into a Paris Review interview. For weeks, I didn’t mind her regaling us with drinking stories about famous authors. But when Dr. Ego ran out of anecdotes, she would cancel class for three weeks to go on a book tour, only to return with yet more drinking stories. At some point, we realized this format wasn’t teaching us anything about writing or publishing.
As it turns out, flirting with Cormac McCarthy over drinks doesn’t land you a book deal. That’s what I learned in grad school.
Eventually, we found out that Dr. Ego actually didn’t know anything about getting published. Her insanely wealthy cousin read her first novel when she was 23 and gave it to one of his friends, who happened to be a literary agent. Instant publishing contract. The novel tanked commercially, but she somehow wound up publishing three or four more novels with indie presses. I read all of them, because she assigned them.
No teacher is perfect. So if you have a professor who actually seems to put in a reasonable amount of effort, answers your emails, and tries to prepare you for an actual career, do me a favor: Give them a fucking break. Many of us could coast on our charm, phone it in, and do the bare minimum required to keep from getting fired. We don’t, though. Many of us take pride in our work, and we actually care about your education, and your future. Of course, I think most of my students appreciate that. Because I’ve had my fair share of lazy teachers, I don’t want anyone to suffer through the same nonsense. Education is expensive these days. We can’t have people throwing their money away on teachers like these.
